Let's add these to the pile:
Perhaps the surprise isn’t that the Rays have come back to earth – it’s that they were ever elite in the first place.
The Rays have been exploiting smaller and smaller edges over the last 10 years. In the mid-2000’s, the Rays had the huge advantage of picking at the top of the draft, a position that netted them franchise cornerstones like
David Price and
Evan Longoria and vaulted their minor league system to the best in the game. However, as the Rays’ major league team began to improve, the draft position worsened, and the Rays were forced to look elsewhere; as such, they began to take advantage of the unregulated international market in an attempt to stock their system. Once that avenue was also shut down, the Rays began to shift their focus from edges in talent acquisition to edges inside of the game itself. Luckily for then-GM Andrew Friedman,
Joe Maddon was an ideal manager for such a focus, as no one exploited small edges like Joe Maddon did. In the last couple of years, Maddon pioneered all manner of shifts, stall tactics, bullpen usages and strategies designed to squeeze a few extra runs, a couple extra innings, a few extra outs, whatever he could find at the margins of the game that would make his team a little better. The Rays of the last couple years haven’t been in the playoffs, but they’ve always seemed to be in the hunt, and they always had at least one ridiculous stretch of baseball per season where’d they’d go 17-1 and scare the daylights out of the rest of the division.
Unfortunately for the Rays, that tireless manager and the general manager he worked with are now gone, headed for greener pastures and larger paychecks. The replacements (GM Matthew Silverman and manager
Kevin Cash) seem to be doing just fine, leading the team to perform about as well as one might expect given their payroll, talent and situation. The problem is that a team in the Rays’ position needs to play significantly
above expectations, and the Rays aren’t doing that. Their farm system is good, but not great (they’ve got three impact players in
Willy Adames,
Daniel Robertson and
Adrian Rondon, but are otherwise middle-of-the-pack). Their pitching staff is pretty good (fifth in the AL by ERA+). The lineup has a couple good players and a bunch of other guys (they’re ninth in the AL by OPS+)… it’s the recipe for a decidedly okay team. Of course, no one wants an okay team, but the Rays are caught in the no-man’s land of a low-budget team that isn’t drafting highly.
More to read
On July 28, Washington Nationals GM Mike Rizzo pulled off a masterstroke of a trade. The Nationals acquired
Jonathan Papelbon, the disaffected but extremely effective Phillies closer who desperately wanted to be traded to a good team. The new pitcher would cost the Nationals prospect
Nick Pivetta, but Papelbon would fortify an already strong bullpen; with a more accomplished closer on the roster,
Drew Storen would gracefully slide into the 8th inning role, and the rest of the bullpen would slide down accordingly. After seeing the 2014 Nationals’ postseason derailed by bullpen woes, Rizzo clearly decided that he would do everything possible to avoid repeating that fate.
Only… it didn’t work. The Papelbon trade backfired badly. Drew Storen, the defrocked closer, lost confidence, gave up 14 runs in his next 18 2/3 innings, and then broke his finger by slamming it in his locker. The rest of the Nationals seemed to follow suit; after the Papelbon trade, the team went 8-15 over their next 23 games. Washington’s lead over the Mets quickly evaporated, and by the time that Storen lost his fight with a locker room fixture, the Nats were seven games back of New York. Papelbon, for his part, has been decent on the field (if a bit of an agitator/asphyxiant off of it), but there’s only so much a closer can do on a team that can’t seem to garner a lead — since joining the Nationals, Papelbon has entered the game in a save situation just nine times and converted seven of those opportunities.
Did the Papelbon trade really make that much of a difference? Can a trade that brings in a high-quality player really have such a dramatically negative effect on a team? On its face, the whole concept seems bizarre; Papelbon is a
fantastic closer, and adding talent should always be better than not adding talent. On the other hand, Storen has struggled with demotion before; when the Nationals pushed Storen out of the closer role for
Rafael Soriano in 2013, Storen lost his command and eventually needed to go to AAA in order to sort himself out. Moreover, A’s fans would argue that the exact same situation happened to their team last year;
Billy Beane got too cute with the best team in the league, traded for
Jon Lester (the best starter on the market), then watched as the team unraveled and nearly missed the playoffs altogether. The theory may seem a little crazy, but it’s certainly a theory with a large number of adherents and a whole lot of anecdotal support.
Mas valamit
